Saturday, 2 November 2013

Everyman meets a copyright radical

Copyright Radical:
Glad you like them. Down with the Copyright Fascists!

E: Excuse me?

RadiC: Just
practising. Day of Action tomorrow.

E: About copyright?

RadiC: Knowledge
is a common resource. Defend the public domain. Preserve the commons.Freedom is sharing.Copyright enslaves us.

E: Seemed like a voluntary
exchange when I paid for my books.

RadiC:Information wants to be free.Copyright bars the way.

E: Information isn’t
free. Movies don’t get made for nothing.

RadiC: Free as in
speech, not free as in beer.

E: Doesn’t change anything.Who will make movies if anyone can copy the
product?

RadiC: Paintings
came before copyright.

E: When mass copying
was impossible.

RadiC: So when
copying was expensive, the investment to do it had to be protected.Now it costs nothing, copying has to be
stopped?

E: Aren’t you
ignoring public goods?

RadiC: On the contrary. Knowledge is a public good.

E: That sounds bad.

RadiC: How so?

E: This economics textbook
says that consumption of a public good is non-rivalrous and non-excludable.So an unlimited number of people can take a free
ride on the author’s creative investment.That leads to underproduction of creative works.

RadiC: You can prove
anything with economics.

E: The book says
that copyright addresses the free rider problem by introducing excludability. It
creates the possibility of a functioning market.

RadiC: So we end
up with big business controlling knowledge.

E: Not a dynamic marketplace
of ideas?

RadiC: Don’t be
ridiculous.

E: Isn’t the
alternative worse?

RadiC: Knowledge
as the commons. Sounds fine to me.

E: If public goods
are underproduced, next thing you have the State stepping in to correct market
failure.

RadiC: Collective democratic
action.

E: A State-sponsored
representative elite controlling the creative commons in the interest of the voter
coalitions whose interests it serves.What’s
free - as in speech - about that?

RadiC: You’d
rather have unaccountable monopoly US corporations?

E: What the State
controls the State rations, including knowledge.Especially knowledge.

RadiC: This is about
copyright, not the State controlling speech.

E: Shouldn’t we just
try to have the right amount of copyright? Not too little, not too much.

Please Note

The views expressed in this blog are the personal views of Graham Smith alone and are not attributable to the law firm for which he works or to any of its clients. Nothing in this blog constitutes legal advice. Always take advice from a suitably qualified legal practitioner in relation to a specific matter.